


On Dangerous Ground

by reconditarmonia



Category: Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik
Genre: Canon Jewish Character, Case Fic, Competence, F/F, Gen, Magic, Misses Clause Challenge, Murder Mystery, Period-Typical Antisemitism, Pre-Femslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:07:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21812668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/pseuds/reconditarmonia
Summary: When a murder is committed in Vysnia, many more lives than the victim's are at stake if Miryem and Irina can't find the killer.
Relationships: Irina & Miryem Mandelstam, Irina/Miryem Mandelstam
Comments: 26
Kudos: 58
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	On Dangerous Ground

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whetherwoman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whetherwoman/gifts).



> This story contains references to the possibility of violent reprisal against Jews for the killing of a non-Jew attributed to ritual murder by the Jewish community.

The winter passed quickly. It seemed that we had scarcely finished eating the last of the Chanukah latkes -- we meaning my father and mother and Wanda and Sergey and Stepon, all of us in that snug little house in the forest, of course, I couldn’t light eight days of candles in my kingdom of ice -- when I woke up to the singing of a bird outside the window of my grandfather’s house in Vysnia. I knew that if I walked out past the city walls, past the streets where the snow had turned to slush under the daily business of hundreds of feet and to the edge of the forest, I’d find the sleigh waiting. They would always come for me as long as the king’s road was open, but every chance now could be the last, and even with Passover just around the corner, there was too much rebuilding still to do in my kingdom for me to stay here until next winter.

I had been busy enough at home, too. Wanda had shown me the books, when I first returned, and told me about how my father had forgiven the winter’s debts, but there were still furriers and oven-makers who did worse business with the summer’s return and needed him to loan them a little cash even if it meant seeking him out at the farm, and others who found that they couldn’t make as much money selling their harvest when everyone had a harvest to sell again. So if the people in town thought they’d washed their hands of me just because I was a queen and everyone I cared about didn’t live there anymore, they were wrong. I didn’t mind doing the collecting myself, to make sure they remembered me, but neither did Wanda, when I couldn’t. I was away traveling again, she told our customers whenever I had to pass any time among the Staryk, seeking out fantastical new things to sell them. She could not possibly renegotiate the debt without my permission. Perhaps I was rubbing elbows with the Sultan or the nobles of France, right at this moment. And then I would return, make new loans, and sell the goods I had asked my grandfather’s agents to purchase, to build a wall of gold to protect my family when I was gone. It wouldn’t guarantee their safety, but a wall of gold was better than the wall of parchment that stood between them and the flood now. 

It wasn't entirely a lie when Wanda would imply that I was on speaking terms with royalty. Irina consulted me when she visited her father’s house in Vysnia, sometimes sending her servants to escort me from my grandfather’s and once even from the forest. She had never come there herself, of course, but I couldn’t help imagining her under those snow-covered trees, an echo of the time in the Staryk lands when we'd plotted together to kill our husbands. We never spoke of that. She had a head for the people of her court, the spiderweb of marriages and loyalties and debts that couldn’t be paid in coin. Their names and faces were all the same to me, these nobles with their crowns and their titles and their rich churchgoing clothes, but I could tell you who was probably bankrupting her lands on additions to her palace, and who was likely to become very wealthy when he found someone better at selling the product of his mines.

Irina was expecting me today; it was why I was in Vysnia, instead of at home near the Staryk road. Maybe, I realized as I set out through the streets, it wasn’t just my family that I would need to say goodbye to before I let the Staryk sleigh take me away; if Irina’s duties here continued to leave her without enough time to make a visit to my kingdom through the mirror, then this would be my last meeting with her, too, until winter came again.

***

Much had changed in my father’s household since the days when I lived up in the attic rooms waiting to be married to whomever my father could get to take me. Not only was the big bedchamber that used to be my mother’s now mine whenever I wished it, whether the tsar accompanied me or no, but I had the use of my father’s study, too. I could sit there with a fire roaring, opposite any one of the lords of Lithvas whose domains lay close to Vysnia, and discuss the state of their taxes and their children and their armed men. What a gift, I might imply, to have Her Majesty’s gracious intercession with the tsar in matters which rested upon his decision, and not to have to travel all the way to Koron.

It was also where I met with Miryem, that winter, when I wanted to ask her advice on the tsar’s council’s tax recommendations, on how best to change the collectors’ sacks of grain into ships for the navy, on the state of the imperial treasury five years from now. Perhaps one day she would accept my invitation to visit the court in Koron, as the queen of the Staryk, a powerful ally, rather than as a little Jewish moneylender. For now, I was content to have her as my secret weapon, and hope that it didn’t wound her pride to accept invitations that anyone else would have had to take as summonses. Miryem always looked a little different, when she had only just come back from seeing to affairs in the Staryk country. She always carried her head high, even without the weight of that great golden crown I had only seen her wear that one night, but a little of that deeper winter seemed to hang on her; it was like I could see her hands waving aside the snowfall as she moved them when she spoke, or the snowflakes still settled in her hair even when we sat by the fire. It seemed impossible that she could walk through the streets without turning heads, the way she had the first time we met, when I barely noticed her beside the Staryk necklace she brought. I supposed it was like the way everyone in the court looked at me with my fairy silver, except that she didn’t need to wear anything special. Maybe only I could see it.

The maids knew by now how Miryem liked her tea; it wasn’t a surprise that when one servant showed her into the study, another one was close behind with a silver tray that sent curls of steam up into the air. I had passed Nolius, my father’s steward, coming out, bowing low as he met me, so I knew that I would find thick cream-white paper and ink to hand if we needed it.

“Good afternoon, Panovina Mandelstam,” I said, taking in the sight of her as she sat down and made herself at home with the tea: small, dark and plain, in a dress of deep blue wool with embroidery like little stars, trimmed in white fur. She must have been as out of place in her fairy kingdom, in all her humanity, as she was here as its queen, but I could still imagine that she brought the scent of winter with her. "I have an interesting problem."

***

It was, as Irina said, an interesting problem -- Kovrinas was a principality rich in timber and farmland, and yet brought very little in tax to the treasury, so where was it all going? -- but we had barely scratched the surface of it when I began to hear voices coming from outside the door of the study, close by but difficult to make out, as if people were arguing about whether or not we could be disturbed. After a few moments, the door opened. It wasn’t a servant; it was a city watchman. “Your Majesty, I beg your pardon,” he said, bowing low. He was very young, barely more than a boy. I could already tell that this wasn’t something he was supposed to be bringing to the attention of the tsarina herself. “I would rather anything than distress Your Majesty, but I’m afraid that one of your servants has been killed.”

I thought for a moment that I must have misheard. “Killed?” Irina said, in a strangely small voice.

“Yes, Your Majesty. I’ve just come from Siaura Street where the boy was found.” A chill settled into my body, colder than the Staryk winter. He went on, but it was like I was hearing him from a long way away, or through layers of wool or ice. “I knew him by his livery, but we brought his body, and His Grace’s men were able to tell us who he was.” He gulped. “Please allow me to beg you not to view it. I fear the sight of so much blood would distress Your Majesty.”

I listened numbly as he named the boy and assured Irina that the killers would be found swiftly. Irina thanked him, and he turned to leave.

“Why was he in the Jewish quarter?” I blurted out. Irina turned and looked sharply at me, as if she had forgotten I was there. She wouldn’t have known, but Siaura Street crossed the street leading from the market to my grandfather’s house; I passed it every time I visited. 

The watchman barely looked at me, with Irina there. I was glad of it, and hated that I was glad of it. “He might not have gone there willingly at all, Panova. This is what happens in places like this -- you know the danger of allowing the Jews to live here.” It was hard to believe that he and Irina couldn’t hear how loud my heart was thudding in my chest.

And then I watched Irina understand what I had understood as soon as I heard that a young Christian had bled to death in the Jewish quarter right before Passover. “God preserve us,” she said. “I must retire; I can’t continue discussing matters of state with this dreadful news on my mind. Please send all my women to my sitting-room so that their conversation can distract my thoughts. My footmen will escort my guest home.”

She took my hand in hers, meeting my eyes. “I promise we’ll unravel this before long.” I could only hope that she was Staryk enough to keep that promise.

A terrible, wild thought seized hold of me when we came to the turning, with the road to our quarter on one hand and the road to the city gates on the other: how easy it would be to flee. I could turn right, and let Irina’s servants see me back to my grandfather’s house. Or I could turn left, pass the gates, and run and run until I could take the sleigh to where they could never find me or reach me. No one but Irina would ever know that I had known what was coming. The escape tunnel that my grandfather had kept in reserve for decades, against a day just like this one, wasn’t a secret anymore, and all the power of a queen of the Staryk couldn’t protect us from being dragged from our burning homes here in the sunlit world. And what good was being a queen if I never made it back to the country I was a queen of?

Purim had fallen during my last visit to the Staryk land, while I was there to make records of the harvest of their fields and vines, and Tsop had seen to it that a cook provided me with triangles of fruit wrapped in a translucent, nutty dough, and strong wine if I chose to drink it. It wasn’t the same as exchanging gifts with my family at home, with my father wearing a mask that he didn’t pretend could fool anyone, or dancing at a costume ball that spilled out into the streets of the Jewish quarter, but the Staryk had reason enough to celebrate a queen saving her people at the risk of her own life. I didn’t want to be Esther: I wanted to be Miryem Mandelstam, and if I fled, I wouldn’t be either. Not when my grandparents, and my cousin Basia with her child on the way, and the baker’s apprentice who’d greeted me in mame-loshn as I passed his stall this morning, and the Torah scrolls in the synagogue, could all be ashes by sunrise. Fleeing was never a choice I would make, and I knew it: I hadn’t chained winter’s king for my people only to keep quiet and hide and let them burn.

***

I lost no time in questioning the women of the household, from the highest servant to the lowest. Now that I was tsarina, I had a small army to wait on me, so even the reduced complement that accompanied me on my trips to Vysnia were more than I could hope to have come to know, as I had once known my father’s household, in less than a year. So even after Magreta told me the boy’s name, Matis, I couldn’t match it to a face; I had to find out everything I could about him, so I could learn who might have wanted him dead. Whether I knew him or not, he was one of my people, a tiny part of the Lithvas that I’d made a deal with Chernobog to save. People died in my kingdom every day, but I fought off their deaths as best I could with alliances and budgets and words in the tsar’s ear; if I’d failed to protect this one, then I could at least make sure that he was the killer’s last victim.

It was hard to know what was useful. Matis had been orphaned of both father and mother, servants to the royal household in Koron, not long before I was crowned, but had become a great favorite of the cooks. One in particular was like an aunt or older sister to him, and had responded to my summons in tears; I dismissed her, since it seemed unlikely that she would be useful to me in her distraught state. Until recently, his duties never took him outside the house, whether we were in Vysnia or Koron, and never to the Jews’ quarter, but an abbess in Vysnia, who had never had children before taking vows, had taken a liking to him when she met with me here, so he was sometimes employed as a messenger to her monastery. She had even, said a cook, spoken of prevailing upon her worldly relatives to pay for the boy to study at a gymnasium. 

“Why a gymnasium?” I asked. 

He was bright for his age and could read, they explained, and she saw potential in him. Privately they had laughed at the idea of him having the discipline for the classics, which I could tell at any rate they thought were probably a waste of time, when he could be doing good honest work and helping them keep track of the kitchen supplies instead. Now I saw real regret in their eyes at the loss of the little scholar, and couldn’t help sharing in it myself, although even the dullest and least promising to the kingdom would have weighed just as heavy on my conscience.

Whether he wanted it or not, the abbess’s favor made Matis the object of violent jealousy among other servant boys his age, and he was more likely to go around with the craftsmen’s sons of the town when he could get away. It kept him out of their hair, the maids said, even if he might be getting up to no good. Only last night one of them, Duchana, had had to chase him out of the duke’s own study, another time he’d been caught spying on the tsar’s valet with his wife, and who could tell what pranks he and his friends played in the streets, out from under the watchful eyes in my father’s house; when they entrusted him with a secret, not even the cooks could get it out of him. None of these petty annoyances seemed big enough to kill a person over. I couldn’t claim an innocent heart -- something only Miryem would ever know the whole truth of -- but when I’d thought to kill, the fate of a realm rode on my decision. If it would help, Duchana added, they could tell me who the other boys were, the ones who had ever come by, and who their fathers were. 

“No,” I said, shaking my head slowly, realizing. “Go back. Tell me about the study.”

***

I felt safer as soon as I had passed the gate into our quarter. A strange thing to feel, when there had been a murder here not too long ago, and when I could tell I wasn’t the only one here with fears of the wave about to rise and take us all. But I was among my own people again, and I had work I could do. I didn’t go right to Siaura Street; to get there from the gate, the boy would have had to pass through the market, and anyway, I didn’t think Irina wanted her servants knowing I was nosing around. “I have some things I need to buy in the market,” I told my escort. “I can walk home on my own from here.” They were reluctant to leave until they'd discharged their duty. So I had to spend thirty-five minutes browsing through new dresses to wear at Passover, before I could persuade them to take my coin and go to the tavern for a drink as thanks for keeping me safe.

When they were gone, I figured I might as well start with the dressmaker. If I didn’t think too much about it, I could imagine that this was like asking my three nightly questions of the Staryk king. I had to find out what I could without letting anyone wonder why I was asking so much; I wasn’t worried about my own people knowing that I was trying to find out who the real murderer was, but I didn’t know what could happen if any one of them accidentally let something slip to someone from outside. 

The dressmaker hadn’t seen the boy -- in fact, only the bakers and their apprentices had, and this told me that it had been early morning when he’d come through. No one else was with him. “He was carrying a big book,” one of them said, “so he was probably going to see Panov Abramovitch.” Panov Abramovitch bought and sold books in several languages. “I called out to him, but he was in such a hurry!”

A book. The watchman hadn’t mentioned that any book had been found with the body. If the duke had wanted it sold or appraised in secret, or for that matter if it was worth stealing from the duke, maybe it was valuable enough for someone to kill for, too.

I had to speak to Panov Abramovitch. I found him at his stall at the edge of the market. “Panovina Mandelstam,” he greeted me. We didn’t know each other well, but my grandfather had loaned him money to start his business when he moved to Vysnia from Minask. 

“Panov Abramovitch,” I acknowledged. With him, I wouldn't waste time on small talk about how terrible the news of the murder was and how close he might have come to it. “The tsarina’s servant -- is it true that he came to see you this morning?”

The bookseller nodded warily, but didn’t say anything more. I might have to give a little away if I was going to get anything from him. “I think I can find out who killed him, or at least prove that it wasn’t one of us,” I told him, low. I hoped that my run of keeping impossible promises would hold. “I don’t mean to pry, Panov -- but what was the book he wanted to show you?”

A frown creased his brow. "No, no, he didn't have anything for me," he said. "He only came in to ask directions. Panovina Mandelstam, he was looking for you."

***

I was waiting in the study again, seated at my father’s desk, when Miryem returned. Seeing her in the doorway, I felt what she must have felt when the tsar and I stood on the threshold at her cousin’s wedding: fear and relief mingled until they were only one feeling, the knowledge both that the time of reckoning had come and that only together could we see it through. She couldn’t look away from me, and I wondered what she saw.

The moment passed, and she came in. Her cheeks were pale. “The news has gotten out,” she said. “I could hear people talking about it, as I came back here.” She’d stood tall and walked through the streets with all of those eyes on her, I thought, as though the city were a forest where every shadow hid a hungry beast. I didn’t know how much more time we had.

Quickly I told her what I’d learned. “I think Matis must have found out something he shouldn’t have,” I said. “Something that would make him an enemy more powerful than anyone expected. He could have overheard any number of state secrets if he liked to hide in here, and the lords of my court wouldn’t be lords for very long if they weren’t ruthless.” The servants had brought a new tray of tea, a little while ago now, and I drank mine, though it was bitter and cooling. “I still don’t know why he was in the Jewish quarter, though; I suppose the killer could have killed him somewhere else, and left the body there. I don’t know whose secrets he might have known, but I know who’d pay an assassin.” Perhaps Miryem had been able to find out if someone had been seen who could be the killer; what he looked like, where he went afterwards.

“He was looking for me,” said Miryem, and I felt a chill run up my spine that had nothing to do with the cold tea. “People had seen him with a book, so I thought he must have been taking it to sell, but that’s why he was there.”

I looked around instinctively, but I didn’t see anything missing: the books were as we’d seen them this morning, of course, but nothing seemed to have changed from the day before, either, or the day before that. Something could have been missing from the library, but we’d have to look through the records to know what, even assuming that all the contents of the library were written down. Then I made myself think. Miryem was no bookseller or antiquarian, and she certainly wasn’t known through Vysnia as the queen of the Staryk. If the boy knew of her, it was because of me: because I consulted with her about the money that came in and went out, and she had a head for those figures. My eyes were drawn to the ledger in front of me that tracked the accounts not only of my father’s household, but of all his lands. I stood and pried it open -- it was a big, heavy book, and the leather cover and thick paper landed on the wood of the desk with a thud -- and pushed it across to Miryem, who had come over to stand before the desk. “He was good with numbers. And he could read. Can you tell me if anything is amiss here?”

Miryem bent and scanned the ledger, leafing back through the pages. I came around to lean over her shoulder as she did, even though I knew she could see things in the numbers that I couldn’t. “Everything adds up,” she said, a frown in her voice, continuing to read through the years of accounts. Then suddenly she stood up straight, her hair brushing my chin and her hand marking her place, and flipped through a stack of pages to where she’d begun. She compared the two page spreads, and shoved the book away from her. “This was all copied out at the same time. It’s not the real ledger.” She pointed at some lines. “See, the ink here and how it’s not always new at the beginning of a new day’s entry -- _I_ keep ledgers. I know how they look when you keep them right.”

“Then Matis must have been taking the real one to you,” I realized, a sour taste in my mouth. “To show you something that didn’t seem right.” 

Miryem nodded. She was speaking quickly now, gesturing more emphatically. “The real ledger must have different numbers -- larger revenues, and expenditures that don’t match what you’re really spending here. Or maybe another expense, something vague. He figured out that something was wrong, and whoever was responsible followed him and killed him before he could tell anyone. And then spent some time copying this out, so no one could know.”

For all our meetings here, we’d never actually spoken of my father’s accounts. I looked at the open book again. “Nolius, the duke’s steward,” I said. The handwriting unmistakably belonged to him; I’d seen it on notes and letters for years. As far back as I could remember, Nolius had made himself very fine, but I’d always thought that the money to buy the velvet and the rings came from his family, or from what my father paid him. Not from every one of my father’s peasants from here to Vitesk. 

I couldn’t feel any relief. We’d found the murderer, and I could have soldiers at his door in minutes; it wouldn’t be hard to get him to confess where he’d hidden the ledger, and prove that he’d followed Matis to the Jewish quarter. But for years, my father had put his trust in someone who would steal, and who would kill to keep his stealing a secret. I looked over at Miryem, thinking that she, at least, would feel that a great weight had been lifted from her mind now that we both knew the murderer was not a Jew, but her face was still troubled.

Something fell into place in my mind; it wasn’t only the revelation of Nolius’s duplicity that was disturbing me. I said, softly, what we were both thinking: “It won’t matter, will it?”

***

All afternoon, I hadn’t wanted to think about that possibility. I’d asked my questions, and followed the boy’s trail through our quarter and the murderer’s through the accounts, and as long as I had a question burning in my mind, I didn’t have to wonder if it would all be for nothing. But now that we’d found out what really happened, I was forced to face it: before the news spread that the boy had been killed to cover up a fraud, not bled in someone's fever dream of a Passover ritual, it could be too late. Even Irina might not be believed, when we were there to blame. Irina’s words cut like a knife, but I couldn’t blame her for giving voice to my own thoughts. 

I could change silver to gold with a touch, but I couldn’t change people’s hearts. And even that, I couldn’t do here, not really. Then I had an idea.

“Quickly! Come with me,” I said, not caring that I was giving orders to the tsarina; I was a queen, too, and if I’d needed to be the moneylender before, the Staryk queen was what I needed to be now. I pushed open the study door and went through the duke’s palace, Irina close on my heels, until I came to the front doors, and threw them open. The sky was streaked with sunset, and the little heaps of snow here and there on the ground glowed a pale pink and orange. I looked around. “I need more snow,” I said. I didn’t explain why, but Irina led me around to the back of the palace, where the snow had melted on some of the footpaths, but for the most part was still a thin white blanket stretching far away in front of us over the gardens, towards the wall in the distance.

I reached out and took Irina’s hand, and started to run. The snow crunched under my boots, and at some steps I sank in ankle-deep, but I didn’t let it slow me down. I didn’t dare look back to see if we were leaving grassy footprints behind us. I kept running even as my muscles burned and my breath rasped my throat raw, as my heart raced wildly and Irina’s iron grip crushed my fingers to keep from falling behind and my feet ached with each step. The world blurred around me as the wind full in my face brought tears to my eyes and froze them on my eyelashes and my cheeks. I was flying, no longer sinking into the snow, and it hurt more than any pain I’d ever felt, but not as much as it would hurt to lose everything. And then I couldn’t run anymore; my legs gave out under me and I collapsed down into the snow, but it didn’t feel cold anymore, and the sky above us was a deep blue, scattered with faint stars.

My breath still hurt my throat, and came out as clouds in the freezing air. I hadn’t known if it would work, if the king’s road would open for me, too. “Are we your people?”

“What?” Irina was breathing as hard as I was, still clutching my hand as she stood over me.

I couldn’t stop; I had to make her understand. I gasped in lungfuls of cold air. “You told me that Chernobog couldn’t touch anyone in Lithvas, because you’d made him promise not to harm you and yours. All your people, every soul.” There were demons in our world that weren’t made of fire and flame. “If the Jews are a part of Lithvas--”

Irina went white, and stumbled a little as I clambered up and fell against her, but she was stronger than she looked. “You don’t know how much you’re asking.”

If it was something that would shake the foundation of what we all knew as Lithvas -- so be it and amen. “I know how much. It’s the only way I know how to do it.” I’d brought her here without the aid of a sleigh or fairy silver, because this was where an impossible promise was high magic; because maybe if she promised it here, it’d be in our world that it’d prove true. It wouldn’t be the work of one night; it’d take days, or more likely years, of politics, behind doors that would never be open to me. It might be longer even than the task of mending a broken kingdom of ice. But for now, I could buy one night, and the nights after that, for as long as the tsarina said we were her people, too, and meant it: an invisible line to protect our quarter, and my parents in the forest, and all of us from one end of the empire to the other. _Fair return_. “If it wasn’t hard,” I said, “it wouldn’t be magic.”

Irina considered for a few moments, looking into the distance over my shoulder. Then she studied my face. For all the Staryk in her, her eyes were very brown, and her breath was warm, and I wondered if she was seeing someone who would always be apart from her and hers, whether a Staryk queen or a Jew, or if she would accept the bargain. Then she pressed her lips together for a moment, and spoke. “Tell me how.”

I wouldn’t offer my hand. We were long past shaking on bargains. I closed those last few inches to kiss her, quick and warm, and I didn’t think I was fooling myself to imagine that I felt a tiny shift in the world. “Promise me,” I said. “Promise me, and make it true.”


End file.
